Advances in microprocessor and related technologies have led to wide spread deployment and adoption of powerful general purpose as well as special purpose computing devices. Today, most of these computing devices are multi-media, i.e. video, audio and graphics enabled. Special purpose computing devices include but are not limited to digital camcorders, set-top boxes, and digital versatile disk (DVD) players.
Advances in networking, telecommunication, satellite, content serving and other related technologies have also led to increase in online multi-media content provision, including online purchases, as well as on demand and/or real time delivery of video/or audio content, over private and/or public networks, such as the Internet.
Recently, continuing advances in these technologies have further led to proliferation of portable devices, such as personal digital assistants, wireless mobile phones, portable media player devices, and so forth, as well as media content provision services catered towards selling media content for download onto these portable devices. An example of portable media player devices and associated media content purchase services is the ipod and the associated iTune service available from Apple Computer of Cupertino.
One drawback of the current state of portable media player devices and associated media content purchase services is the fact that the digital rights of the media content are not protected. For example, in the case of iPod, the audio content is provided in MP3 format, which may be rendered by any device equipped with a MP3 player. The media contents are freely transferable from one media player device to another. Further, the download is typically effectuated through specific uniform resource locators (URL) that directly identify the corresponding media content files (in MP3 format) and the locations the files are stored and may be retrieved. For the general media consuming population, it remains not the most user friendly approach.